6 Free Apps and Utilities for Working with Video
April 30th, 2008 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 25 CommentsTweet This
Increasingly, from blogs to marketing materials to online video show production, web workers are working with video. The good things you can do with online video go far beyond YouTube, and there are a number of free applications and utilities–many of them open source–that you can turn to to help with web video tasks. In this post, I’ll round up six of my favorites.
If you send video of any kind out on a network basis, look into Xvid. This free application compresses video files, which are often huge and unwieldy in size. I’ve gotten better than 100-to-1 compression ratios with Xvid.
Blender is not only one of the best graphics programs from the open source world, it’s one of the best open source applications of any kind. Widely used in the video and animation communities, it’s great for 3D modeling, animation, rendering, and playback. You can also use it on Windows, Mac or Linux systems.
If you use a Mac, Simple Theora Encoder is a free open source application that can convert multiple files at once from several different formats, including .avi, .mov, and mp4. In keeping with the application’s name, you just hit Encode and you’re off to the races.
For simple video tasks, Windows Movie Maker from Microsoft is free, and it’s more than good enough at editing tasks to do professional-looking short videos. It comes complete with a library of slick video transitions.
MediaInfo is a free, open source application that specializes in giving you a complete taxonomy of properties for audio and video files. It has only a 1.3MB footprint–small enough that I carry a version on my pocket USB thumb drive. If you have the Windows version of MediaInfo installed, you can also add it to your right-click context menus so that you can get to the properties of a video or audio file with one mouse click.
VirtualDub is a free program for Windows users that works as a video capture and processing utility. It’s not quite as feature rich as a tool such as Adobe Premiere, but it is faster and easier to work with.
Do you know of any good, free video applications or utilities?
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I think it is worth mentioning 2 superb free products which are well established video tools: the powerful SUPER © and the versatile MediaCoder.
The first application on this list for me would have been Super – http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html – a great video and audio encoding utility with a plethora of options.
MPEG Streamclip is a great, free, fast video player and converter for Mac and Windows. http://www.squared5.com/
I love Blender. Its a true video editing application !
Do any of these, or are there any other DVD Producers? I’ve used Windows Movie Maker, but I have no way of getting those videos onto a Video DVD with Menu’s and Chapters
and not to forget mplayer/mencoder. http://mplayerhq.hu
it’s not that userfriendly (in fact it’s absolutely user unfriendly), but mencoder is the most universal tool i’ve found so far.
I dont know if it’s 100% relevant, but I’ve found CamStudio (camstudio.org) EXCELLENT for general Screen Recording (Not movies or games, but normal stuff, like web, notepad, showing people around your PC, etc) and the MS-CRAM Codec + WinRAR = 50MB Video Compressed to < 1MB .rar file! :D PERFECT for storage (If you need to store that type of stuff), uploading, and people with slow connections :)
- Reelix
Contact: 2r4eeli7x@gmail.com (Leaving out the 2, 4 and 7)
Check out WWIGO from http://www.motvik.com to know how to convert a smartphone camera into webcam for free.